Three Children, a Rabbi, and Three Soldiers

Three shootings, two guns, one man on a black motorbike, fleeing the scene. The incidents can be tied together with the help of forensics: some of the bullets that killed three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse this morning came from the same .45-calibre gun used the Sunday before last to kill a paratrooper, also in Toulouse, and two more paratroopers last Thursday in Montauban, thirty miles away. The crimes might also be connected, suggestively—although, at the moment, far less than conclusively—by method and possible motive. The children were Jewish; the three soldiers, and a fourth, who is still in a coma, had North African or Caribbean ancestry. (They were all French men; one had served in Afghanistan.) In what sort of rope of hate might they have been looped together?

At the school, the shooter began with a nine-millimetre, but discarded it when it jammed. The adult victim was Rabbi Jonathan Sandler; two of the children were his sons Arye and Gabriel, who were six and three, and the third was an eight-year-old girl named Miriam Monsonego, according to the Times. Miriam’s father was the principal at the school; the BBC reported that he saw her die. Other children were sent running amid gunfire. According to the Guardian, another father told French television, “I saw two people dead in front of the school, an adult and a child… I did not find my son. Apparently he fled when he saw what happened.” The killer rode off on a motorbike.

President Nicolas Sarkozy came to Toulouse and called it a “national tragedy.” Sarkozy is in the middle of a reëlection campaign, and his main rival, François Hollande, came to the city, too. Marine Le Pen, the right-wing National Front candidate, cancelled her campaign events: “I will not comment on how this could touch politics,” she said on French television, according to the Telegraph. “We are waiting, the whole country is waiting impatiently for this serial killer to be found so that all of us can breathe again.” Will she breathe easier, no matter what we learn about why the killer did what he did?

In the earlier incidents, Sergeant Imad Ibn-Ziaten was shot in the head by someone who apparently answered his classified ad about selling a motorcycle; he was thirty. The other victims were Private Mohamed Legouard, who was twenty-six, and Corporal Abel Chennouf, who was twenty-four. There is security-video footage of the second shooting; the killer is a man in dark clothes, perhaps pudgy, with a small scar or tattoo in his face. (He’s wearing a motorcycle helmet, but lifts up the visor slightly around the time he turns over and tries to finish off one of the wounded men.) Corporal Chennouf’s girlfriend is seven months pregnant. One wonders what that child will learn about his or her father and country when arriving for the first day of school, a few years from now.

Photograph by Aksaran/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.